- Zephyr (software)
Created at MIT, as part of
Project Athena , Zephyr was designed as aninstant messaging protocol and application-suite with a heavyUnix background. Using the "do one thing, do it well" philosophy of Unix, it was made up of several separate programs working together to make a complete messaging system. Zephyr and IRC are probably the first widely used IP-based instant-messaging systems.Zephyr is the invention of Ciarán Anthony DellaFera who was, at that time, an employee of
Digital Equipment Corporation and a Visiting Research Scientist atProject Athena . The design originated as a solution to the "reverseRemote Procedure Call (RPC)" problem: how can service providers (servers in aclient-server system) locate and communicate with service users. The initial concept emerged from conversations between Ciarán and Michael R. Gretzinger, another systems engineer atProject Athena , in early 1986. By mid to late 1986 Ciarán had distilled the problem to two specific issues: the ability to locate users in a distributed computing environment (known today as "presence detection"), and the ability to deliver scalable, light-weight, and authentic messages in a distributed computing environment. The Zephyr Development Team (Mark W. Eichin, Robert S. French, David C. Jedlinsky, John T. Kohl, William E. Sommerfeld) was responsible for the creation of the initial code-base and the subsequent releases that were issued throughout the late 1980s.Zephyr is still in use today at a few
university environments such as Carnegie Mellon,Iowa State ,University of Maryland, College Park ,Brown University ,North Carolina State University andMIT . It has been largely replaced by modern and more popularinstant messenger systems such as AIM andJabber .Zephyr uses UDP datagrams sent between ports 2102, 2103, and 2104. It is incompatible with most routers doing NAT because it reports the internal IP address and so returning datagrams are incorrectly routed. Most sites have deployed Zephyr using Kerberos 4 authentication exclusively, though in late 2007, some sites, including Iowa State, deployed Zephyr using Kerberos 5.
Multi-protocol IM clients
Adium and Pidgin support the Zephyr protocol.ee also
*
Comparison of instant messaging clients
*Gale, the Caltech equivalent of the Zephyr protocolExternal links
* [http://www.rfrench.org/papers/usenix.pdf The 1988 Usenix paper on Zephyr]
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